Morphing aircraft structures can significantly enhance air vehicle performance. This paper highlights ongoing work to design novel compliant mechanisms that efficiently morph aircraft structures in order to exploit aerodynamic benefits. Computational tools are being developed to design structures that deform into specified shapes given simple actuator inputs. In addition, these synthesis methods seek to optimize the stiffness of the structure to minimize actuator effort and maximize the stiffness with respect to the environment (external loading). These tools have been used to study two different types of morphing systems: (i) variable geometry wings and (ii) high-frequency vortex generators for active flow control. Several case studies are presented which highlight the design approach and computational and experimental results of these morphing aircraft systems.
Compliant mechanisms are devices which utilize elastic deformation to emulate the behavior of conventional rigid mechanisms. Structural optimization techniques represent a relatively new approach for automating topology synthesis of compliant mechanisms. A cantilever beam model is presented in order to examine the solution behavior of various objective functions intended for compliant mechanism optimization. The model reveals that objective functions which attempt to simultaneously maximize the flexibility and stiffness of a compliant mechanism can be formulated such that they are not well-bounded. Topology optimization problems using these types of objective functions may exhibit heightened convergence sensitivity with respect to the lower design variable bound. The cantilever beam model is also used to develop a new objective function based on maximizing the energy throughput of a compliant mechanism pushing against an external spring. The objective function shows a well-bounded solution to the simple beam model and consequently exhibits more robust optimization convergence. A simple numerical example is given which demonstrates the heightened robustness of the formulation.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.